Visual Cognitive Neuroscience Lab
Welcome to Marius Peelen's Visual Cognitive Neuroscience lab
We use fMRI, M/EEG, TMS, eye tracking, and psychophysics to study visual perception and attention in humans.
We are based at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour in Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Lab news:
09/24: New paper reporting an MEG study investigating the effects of attention and scene context on object category decoding.
09/24: Welcome to Leni Wei (post-MSc intern) and Cas Rekoert (MSc intern), who will work on analyzing data from the Healthy Brain Study.
09/24: Aaron Schnippe successfully defended his MSc thesis and will move on to do a PhD in Munich - congrats!
08/24: Congratulations to Qiu Han for winning an ECVP poster prize!
06/24: The proposal for a new BSc in Human Neuroscience at Radboud University was positively evaluated by the Accreditation Organisation and will start in September 2026.
05/24: Symposium on mental imagery and sensory sensitivity in Tilburg, organized by Tessa van Leeuwen.
05/24: CAOs workshop in Rovereto, with profs Bonini, Fattori, Fiehler, Hebart, Jenkins, de Lange, and Wurm!
04/24: Visual perception symposium at the Neuronus conference in Krakow, Poland.
03/24: New paper in iScience, showing how knowledge biases visual memory of body postures.
03/24: Marius appointed professor of visual and cognitive neuroscience (link)
03/24: Marius receives Vici grant to work on the interplay between internally and externally generated representations in visual cortex (link)
02/24: New paper in JEP:HPP, investigating visual search for objects at different distances in scenes . pdf
02/24: New paper in eNeuro, using EEG to demonstrate how top-down attention facilitates memory search. link
02/24: New paper in J Neurosci, investigating the neural correlates (fMRI, MEG, DNN) of cued and oddball visual search. link
02/24: New paper in JEP:HPP, investigating the automatic retrieval of real-world object size knowledge using the size Stroop effect. pdf
12/23: Congratulations to Surya for winning the NVP Early Career Award!!
11/23: Review Predictive processing of scenes and objects published in Nature Reviews Psychology
11/23: Welcome to Lydia, who will do her MSc internship with us.
09/23: Giacomo successfully defended his PhD! See some picture here and the full thesis here.
08/23: Paper "Testing cognitive theories with multivariate pattern analysis of neuroimaging data" out in Nature Human Behaviour [see here for preprint]
07/23: Maelle's first paper published in JEP:HPP!
06/23: Talia's paper investigating object-based sharpening of scene representations now out in Cerebral Cortex. See the Twitter thread for a summary.
06/23: Paper showing that observers automatically predict object orientation based on scene context out in Cognition. See the Twitter thread for a summary.
06/23: Preprint investigating where, when, and how neural similarity between targets and distractors predicts visual search performance
06/23: New preprint: Objects in familiar constellations evoke high-level representations of real-world size
05/23: Marius joins the Science Advances editorial board
05/23: Congratulations to Marco for winning an abstract award at the CAOs workshop!
05/23: Preprint investigating the attentional template for near and far search using behavioral measures.
05/23: Review paper on Predictive processing of scenes and objects
04/23: Preprint investigating dynamic context effects on object perception.
04/23: What drives the automatic retrieval of real-world object size knowledge? This is the question we addressed in a recent study (preprint).
04/23: Preprint showing that objects sharpen scene representations now online.
03/23: fMRI paper on statistical learning of spatiotemporal structure, in collaboration with Floris de Lange's group, now available here.
02/23: Welcome to Aaron (MSc intern) and Natalia (visiting PhD student)!
01/23: New paper on the boundary extension illusion published in Psychological Science.
12/22: Can neuroimaging data be used to test cognitive theories? Read our take on this in this preprint.
12/22: How does knowledge affect the perception of body postures? See our recent results in this preprint.
11/22: Giacomo completes his PhD by submitting an impressive thesis, starting the next day with a postdoc in Amsterdam.
11/22: Congratulations to Sushrut for a very convincing PhD defense.
10/22: Check out our new preprint on how expected distractor context biases the attentional template.
09/22: Paper out in Journal of Vision: Statistical learning of distractor co-occurrences facilitates visual search
09/22: All the best to Chuanji Gao, who will return to China to start his own group after a fun and productive time with us
09/22: Welcome to Eelke Spaak, who will be affiliated with the lab while he builds his own group.
08/22: Paper out in JEP:HPP: The time course of categorical and perceptual similarity effects in visual search. (preprint)
07/22: Congratulations to Jochem for completing his MSc internship and thesis (Cum Laude)!
07/22: Welcome back to Lu-Chun, who joins us as a postdoc after finishing her PhD in Taiwan
06/22: New paper investigating the time course of categorical and perceptual similarity effects in visual search. Soon to appear in JEP:HPP.
05/22: Welcome to Susan, who will do a remote internship with us from India
04/22: Paper out in NeuroImage: Body shape as a visual feature: Evidence from spatially-global attentional modulation in human visual cortex
04/22: Preprint showing that learned co-occurrence statistics between distractors increases search efficiency
03/22: Congratulations to Giacomo for winning a Donders poster award!
02/22: New paper in JEP:G: "Affective valence of words differentially affects visual and auditory word recognition". Preprint here.
02/22: First experiment started in the muZIEum! We will measure inattentional blindness for a range of objects. See here for background.
01/22: Marius starts as speaker of Donders Institute Theme 2 (Perception, Action and Decision-making).